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MinnieMuseThe FounderThe LogoPress/Projects

Mission Statement

A Muse is an individual whose purpose is to ignite inspiration and imagination in a creative artist. Minnie Muse is a research-based digital digest, offering a unique perspective on the power of inspiration and imagination. Original content presented on Minnie Muse is developed through studying, analyzing and celebrating the cross-pollination of creativity that occurs throughout art, fashion, design and architecture. Minnie Muse wishes to provide a unique language and lens in which to understand and contextualize the ever-present connections that exist between multi-disciplinary creative fields.
The overarching objective of Minnie Muse is to build a highly searchable creative hub of information to be used as both a reference site and a collaborative outlet. Minnie Muse is a contributor-based website, offering users an opportunity to upload pertinent images and content to articles of their choosing. Original content on Minnie Muse is merely a starting point; contributions are encouraged for new ideas to emerge!

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Article Types

Often the most research-intensive and extensive of article categories, Parallel Practices is the heart of the Minnie Muse ethos, discovering and uncovering commonalities between creative disciplines, with references often spanning decades and sometimes centuries.

Musings are brief extracts of noteworthy information often focused on a single creative disciple. Musings typically include a hand-full of images and a short amount of explanatory text focused on significant stories and references behind art, fashion, design and architecture.

Muse Boards are the Minnie Muse approach to recreating a designer’s mood board. Each Monday a Muse Board is posted highlighting a runway collection throughout history, dissecting inspirations and deconstructing the cacophony of artistic and cultural references the featured designer may have enlisted that season to create their collection.

Founder

Colby Jordan Mugrabi

Colby Jordan Mugrabi grew up in Chicago, Illinois and moved to New York City in 2011 to attend the Gallatin School at NYU, where she majored in art history and fashion business. After completing a lengthy senior thesis on artist books, and graduating top of her class in 2015, Colby, eager to continue satisfying her thirst for knowledge and discovery, decided to launch Minnie Muse to feed her academic and creative interests in both history and the arts. After spending almost a year working on the website’s design and content, Minnie Muse launched in November 2017. Today, Colby lives and works in New York City, focusing her time on researching, developing and writing all original content presented on Minnie Muse, as well as on collaborative projects for a number of publications, retailers, brands and institutions within fashion and the creative arts. Colby is currently a contributor to W Magazine and Architectural Digest, as well as an active member of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, Colby serves on the Film & Video Committee at the Whitney Museum of Art as well as on the board of The Shed, a multi-disciplinary arts center located in New York City’s Hudson Yards set to open in spring of 2019.

The Minnie Muse Logo

The Minnie Muse logo was developed and hand-drawn by Colby Mugrabi following an inspiring visit to the Calder Foundation for a short tutorial on the history of Alexander Calder’s jewelry. Calder approached the design and creation of jewelry in a nearly identical manner by which he addressed his more formal, sculptural works. Amongst the numerous necklaces, bracelets, earrings, brooches and tiaras the American sculptor produced throughout his lengthy career, lays a subcategory of work known as the ‘initial brooches’. These brooches were an inventive ode to the Parisian avant-garde, recalling the wordplay of Surrealism in Calder’s imaginative manipulation of the names and initials of his friends, family and contemporaries, all manifested in pin-form. The Minnie Muse Logo was inspired by the curvilinear line Calder used to represent the letter “M” in a number of brooches, particularly one containing the initials “MR,” for Mary Rower, Calder’s younger daughter. At first glance, the symmetrically curved metal line appears to be an ornamental squiggle as opposed to an alphabetical character. Through a comparably artistic, visual manipulation of a monotonous letter of the alphabet, the Minnie Muse logo was born.